Banish the Bully in Your Brain – How Hypnotherapy and NLP may tame anxiety

Updated: Dec 19, 2019

Ever felt intimidated by your own thoughts? Do you feel like they’re thinking you, rather than the other way around? Want to know how to stop them? Read on!

For those who suffer from anxiety, whether this is generalised anxiety disorder or just an anxiousness around certain events, or a tendency to anticipate something bad happening, it may almost feel like we have no control over how we react and once the anxiety kicks in, we don’t know how to stop it. We just know that it feels bad.

Reasons for experiencing anxiety are numerous and could be from a learned habit, or a reaction from a past traumatic event, low self-esteem or many others.

So, what’s happening in the brain to make us react this way? Neuroscience tells us that when we learn something new, a behaviour, skill, pattern and so on, a new neural pathway is created in the brain, and with repetition and reinforcement, this neural pathway becomes thicker, and stronger, imagine it like a huge 6-lane motorway. Anxiety is like learning a new skill, we do it a few times, and then some more and before we know it, it becomes our conditioned response, a wide and busy 6-lane motorway.

Luckily due to the neuroplasticity of the brain, it can be rewired a lot more easily than we think. Through hypnosis and NLP, we can interrupt the pattern of anxiety and connect this cluster of neurons to a more resourceful state like relaxation, which in turn helps to “prune” away the neural path called “anxiety”, greatly reducing the size of that 6-lane motorway.

By identifying exactly what your triggers are, for example, whether this be something you see, hear or feel, and whether this is internal or external, we can help to change the way you respond, taking back control and banishing that bully.

Try this cool trick – become aware of the voice in your head. Notice where it’s coming from, is in front of you, to the back, or one side? How does this voice sound? Is it loud, gravelly, squeaky? Does the voice sound like anyone in particular? Notice everything there is to notice about it.

Now imagine it is coming from somewhere outside of yourself like a speaker or radio, and imagine it has a volume switch or dial that can be turned way down – now notice what’s different about that voice.

At Quantum Leap Hypnotherapy we have numerous techniques to help you overcome that anxiety and combined with hypnosis, we can help you make some powerful changes.